Gordon Bunshaft

Gordon Bunshaft (May 9, 1909 – August 6, 1990) was an American architect, a leading proponent of modern design in the mid-twentieth century.

In 1928, I entered the MIT School of Architecture and started my architectural trip.

Today, 60 years later, I've been given the Pritzker Architecture Prize for which I thank the Pritzker family and the distinguished members of the selection committee for honoring me with this prestigious award.

It is the capstone of my life in architecture.

That's it.

Bunshaft was a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art.

He also received the Medal of Honor of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

He received both his undergraduate (1933) and his master's (1935) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then studied in Europe from 1935 to 1937 on a Rotch Traveling Scholarship and the MIT Honorary Traveling Fellowship.

After his traveling scholarships, Bunshaft worked briefly for Edward Durell Stone and the influential industrial designer Raymond Loewy.

Reflecting on his brief stint ("about two or three months") with Loewy, Bunshaft told an interviewer for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project, "I didn’t like it there. Raymond Loewy was a phony. He’d put a gold line on a cigarette or on a railroad train, and he’d get a fee for it."

A partner in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), Bunshaft joined the firm in 1937 and remained with it for more than 40 years.

His notable buildings include Lever House in New York, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the National Commercial Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 140 Broadway (Marine Midland Grace Trust Co.), and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Branch Bank in New York.

(The last was the first post-war "transparent" bank on the East Coast.)

Bunshaft was born in Buffalo, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents and attended Lafayette High School.

A sickly child, he "frequently drew while in bed," his Times obituary notes.

"A doctor who admired his pictures of houses told his mother that her son should become an architect."

In 1937, he joined Skidmore, Owings & Merrill [SOM], where he remained for 42 years (with a hiatus for his service in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II) until he retired in 1979.

Bunshaft's early influences included Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.

"Mies was the Mondrian of architecture, and Le Corbusier was the Picasso," he told the Oral History interviewer.

After World War II, Bunshaft recalled, the cultural climate was well suited to his Miesian/Corbusian vision:

"'So in 1947, here you had these young men ready to go—a lot of them ready, a lot of them just getting into offices—and you had this boom of clients wanting to build buildings. It was easily more of a Golden Age than the Italian Renaissance with the Medicis. When I say clients, they were mostly corporations. The heads of them were men who wanted to build something that they’d be proud to have representing their company, whether it was a bank or whatever. In the corporations in those days, the head man was personally involved and personally building himself a palace for his people that would not only represent his company, but his personal pleasure. They were the new Medicis, and there were many of them. [T]hese people never questioned doing a modern building. They accepted modern architecture. ... I think the reason for that is that they wanted their company to be progressive."

First and foremost among the iconic modernist buildings he designed while at SOM is the renowned Lever House.

Completed in 1952, it was New York’s "first major commercial structure with a glass curtain-wall (only the United Nations Secretariat preceded it)," notes the architecture critic Paul Goldberger, "and it burst onto the stuffy, solid masonry wall of Park Avenue like a vision of a new world.”

Other memorable buildings by Bunshaft include the Manufacturers Trust Company Building (1954), the first bank building in the United States to be built in the International Style; the Pepsi-Cola Building (now 500 Park Avenue), completed in 1959; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, completed in 1963; 140 Broadway (formerly known as the Marine Midland Building), topped out in 1966; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas (1971); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (1974); and the National Commercial Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (1983).

In an interview for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Bunshaft reflected on the Beinecke.

In 1955, he received the Brunner Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and, in 1984, its gold medal.

In 1958, he was elected to the National Academy of Design as an Associate and became a full member in 1959.

From 1963 to 1972, he was a member of the Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C.

He also received the American Institute of Architects Twenty-five Year Award for Lever House in 1980 and in 1988 the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Upon receiving the Pritzker Prize in 1988, for which he had nominated himself, the famously terse architect gave the shortest speech of any winner in the award's history:

"I happen to love books, especially bindings and things, and I thought it ought to be a treasure house and it ought to express that by having a large number of beautiful books displayed behind glass," he told Betty J. Blum in 1990.

"'The structure would be covered with onyx and these big panels would be translucent onyx. It came from my seeing what I thought was onyx in a Renaissance-type palace in Istanbul. … The whole idea of onyx…is because books cannot be exposed to direct sunlight. … [Onyx] admits soft light, but no sunlight, so it’s like being in a cathedral. In ancient times, they used two materials, onyx and alabaster, for small windows. [When onyx of sufficient quality proved impossible to acquire, Bunshaft compromised on a stratum of white marble “that was translucent.”] When the sun pours in, it’s quite nice with the rich books.'"

Bunshaft's only single-family residence was his own, the 2300-square-foot (210 m²) Travertine House.

On his death, he left the house to MoMA, which sold it to Martha Stewart in 1995.

Her extensive remodelling stalled amid an acrimonious planning dispute with a neighbour.

In 2005, she sold the house to textile magnate Donald Maharam, who described the house as "decrepit and largely beyond repair" and demolished it.

The architectural historian Nicholas Adams, author of Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism, has lamented the demolition of the Bunshaft house as "the greatest loss" of all the architect's projects that have succumbed to the wrecking ball.

"[He] and his wife Nina ... never had children and so their home was not designed for a family so much as it was for art," said Adams, in a 2019 interview.

"It had his Miròs, Picassos, Moores, and Dubuffets and was surrounded by a remarkable landscape created by [Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s] Joanna Diman."

Bunshaft was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was the recipient of numerous other honors and awards.